


dream of gardens in the desert sand

by longtime_lurker



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Canon Gay Relationship, Canon-Typical Violence, Eldritch Abomination Cecil, Established Relationship, Hermaphrodites, Horrific Abuse Of Italics & Parentheses, M/M, Porn with a hint of Plot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-23
Updated: 2013-11-23
Packaged: 2018-01-02 10:01:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,735
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1055448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/longtime_lurker/pseuds/longtime_lurker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(here shall we live in this terrible town<br/>and the walls shall have eyes and the doors shall have ears<br/>but we'll dance in the dark and they'll play with our lives<br/>these are the days, these are the strangest of all<br/>these are the nights, these are the darkest to fall<br/>there's fear overhead, there's fear overground<br/>and here are we at the center of it all)</p>
            </blockquote>





	dream of gardens in the desert sand

**Author's Note:**

> first fic type thing I finish in years, and of course it had to be this absurdity. warning for fanon!Cecil like whoa and related fetishization of (deeply unrealistic, not humanly possible as far as I'm aware) intersex anatomy. special apologies to the real-life Cecil, who when taking the WTNV gig probably did not anticipate lending his name to quite this much xenokink porn.

"And now, listeners, an emergency public service announcement! As you may already be aware by the soddenness of your feet or other lower appendages, this evening's sudden downpour is resulting in violent flash floods through Radon Canyon and into the very streets of our beloved Night Vale. Now it appears that these raging floodwaters are bringing with them ravenous hordes of inexplicably _legged_ fish and other marine lifeforms! These unexpected visitors to our peaceful town are reportedly _highly mobile_ and _extremely bloodthirsty_. For our part, listeners, here at Night Vale Community Radio, we strongly suggest that you _stay indoors_ and if possible protect your property and/or person with grave-dirt sandbags and/or similar defensive talismans. That should deter those pesky paranormal predatory waterdwellers! At least, we hope so. 

\- Ah, make that a definite confirmation on the _bloodthirsty_ , listeners; some kind of squid - or octopus? it's a bit hard to see through all this _gore,_ ugh - has just taken our very own intern Johnny, and from the sound of his agonized dying screams it certainly does seem that -"

Carlos winces, flicks off the radio (contrary to popular opinion in town, he is not entirely a slave to the dulcet tones of Cecil's voice. Well. Not outside of their bedroom, at least) and casts a concerned eye out the one single solitary window of his lab, towards the - yes, _raging floodwaters_ wasn't an exaggeration - currently overrunning the normally baked-dry desert ground. He knows his climatology and meteorology and all, knows that such events aren't uncommon on the rare occasions that desert places are struck by heavy precipitation, but he really feels that the evil flesh-eating fish-with-legs are above and beyond.

"And now, the weather!" chirps his radio, which habitually fails to stay OFF when Carlos wants it to stay OFF. It evidently thinks that it knows Carlos's listening-to-Cecil's-voice-related preferences better than Carlos himself does.

(What's worse is that sometimes it's right.)

During the ensuing musical interlude Carlos starts writing up a preliminary report on the (frankly horrifying) results of the latest petri-dish batch, which absorbs him enough that he doesn't catch Cecil's standard soothing goodnight send-off; and he's just getting to the really ghastly _cellular structures heretofore unknown to terrestrial biology_ bit when there's a sweet, high whistle - Night Vale's equivalent of a knock - at the outside door.

He gladly sets down the distressing _thing_ in the petri dish and makes his way to the door (double-thickness, triple-locked and quadruple-bolted - Carlos may still be relatively new to this town, but he didn't fall off the back of the taco truck yesterday). "Yes?" he calls, hoping that the latest deluge of carnivorous sea-creatures haven't mastered the trick of human speech imitation. Yet.

"Carlos!" sings a very familiar voice, rich and silky and - at the moment - highly enthusiastic. "Open up? I brought you some sandbags."

Carlos blows out a relieved breath - no one else in the world can approximate that degree of devotion, or if they can he sure hasn't run into it yet - and begins popping the locks. "Hi, Cecil."

Cecil is wearing hilarious knee-high poison-green rainboots that look to be made from the skin of some giant, unidentified scaly reptile, plus his usual beaming smile. (Or at least, it's pretty usual whenever Carlos sees him. In point of fact Carlos has the idea that said beaming smile is actually maybe specific to his own presence, but it seems presumptuous to _assume_ so.)

"Hello!!!" responds Cecil, sloshing forward through the several inches of water that are already flowing over the doorstep and getting Carlos's socks wet. 

(Then again, it's hard not to be presumptuous when faced with those audible multiple exclamation points, and despite himself it makes Carlos feel kind of warm and gooey inside.) 

"I just came from work," Cecil is saying, "maybe you haven't heard, being so busy with science?? The waters are rising, and bringing their sinister denizens with them! So I stopped by and picked these up on my way -" nodding towards the wheelbarrow that Carlos can see behind him, marked NIGHT VALE DEPT OF PUBLIC WORKS & MIND CONTROL and full of stuffed burlap sacks. "We should really reinforce the building, Carlos. Wouldn't want to lose all your _scientific data!!"_

In his time in Night Vale, Carlos has already learned via bitter experience that it's generally better to listen to - and believe - Cecil than not; moreover, next door he can see that Big Rico's suspiciously gangsteresque 'kitchen staff' are already hard at work constructing their own low wall of stacked sandbags around the pizzeria's perimeter. Accordingly, he nods and peels off his nice pristine freshly-washed-and-bleached lab coat, rolls up his shirtsleeves and shakes back his hair, which makes Cecil look a little bit faint with lust.

Dragging the horribly heavy sacks into a workable flood-barrier takes close to half an hour. One strikes a sharp bit of rock and breaks open, spilling its contents out onto the already-dampening sand. Said contents are, as promised, not sand - which would seem a much more likely candidate, on the face of it, given that they live in the desert - but rather blackish soil studded with obvious bone fragments. Carlos knows better than to question the protective powers of grave dirt, but he does wonder out loud, "Where did the city get this much grave dirt _from,_ anyway?"

 _"Shhh,"_ says Cecil, glancing around in alarm.

The Sheriff's Secret Police are out in force today, given the circumstances, and so Carlos changes the subject right away. If possible, he'd rather not undergo another of their reeducation sessions ever again.

Once they've banked up the entire laboratory building, he turns to Cecil and asks, "What now?"

"Well, I'm all done for the night," says Cecil brightly, if unnecessarily, Carlos's treacherous radio set having already made sure that he barely missed a minute of his - gentleman friend's? Carlos is still unclear on the municipally-approved designation for their relationship - broadcast. "Seems like a nice night to flee home and cower in fear together, don't you think?"

"Sounds perfect," Carlos agrees, and Cecil looks at him with melty eyes. Uh, figuratively melty. Knowing Night Vale, Carlos wouldn't rule out the literal manifestation thereof, either; but, mercifully, he isn't subjected to it this time around. 

Nor is he subjected to all that much in the way of sinister water denizens - though by now the streets are so deeply flooded that Carlos wishes for his very own pair of dragonhide-or-whatever knee boots (and almost says so out loud before remembering that whenever he makes the mistake of mentioning a desire for basically any remotely attainable object of any kind, Cecil has a tendency to run out and buy him six of it). They do have a bad moment on the corner of Main and Alameda, where some kind of kelp-like substance just floating innocuously around the overflowing curbs is discovered to be unexpectedly sentient when it latches onto Carlos's ankle, and Cecil has to beat it off with his hat before it can pull him down into the muddy swirling depths. Still, that's practically nothing compared to the suddenly-landgoing sharks that Cecil assures him are _even now_ attacking City Hall; and finally, just as dusk begins to shade into true night, they reach their happily dry 13th-floor apartment.

 _Their_ apartment. It still sounds odd to Carlos, like something out of somebody else's life. He's never really properly _lived-_ lived with anyone aside from his family before. He doesn't know if Cecil has either, as Cecil always goes strangely vague and glassy-eyed when questioned at all closely on the subject of his own family. Carlos used to be weirded out by that, but if Night Vale has taught him one hard truth, it's that you really can get used to anything.

Which reminds him -

"Don't we need to sandbag here, too?" he asks Cecil, worried less about water damage than the possibility that fish able to supernaturally walk might also (why not?) be able to supernaturally climb walls and/or operate elevators; but Cecil fixes him with that familiar dear-Carlos-I-shall-indulge-your-ignorance-once-again look of his and assures him that their standard-issue residential-zoned pentacle of protection ought to do the trick, and Carlos can really only go ahead and trust him on that one.

-

Outside it's still coming down, and they can hear the faint rush of floodwater out in the nearest ravine-turned-river. 

Inside, in bed, Carlos stretches out like the barren sand wastes, and Cecil slides over him like the swelling rains. 

Sexually speaking, Cecil is absolutely nothing like anybody Carlos has been with before. For one thing, he's…dually equipped in the nether regions, with what aren't quite garden-variety male parts nor female parts but some unearthly combination of both - a fact that Carlos hadn't discovered until immediately before their first time together. It's a good thing he's into women too - and even then, the amalgam of both apparatus at _once_ had taken some getting used to. On multiple occasions Carlos has tried to figure out exactly how that works _inside_ Cecil's body, scribbling diagrams on napkins in a fruitless attempt to fit two different and contradictory sets of reproductive organs into a normal-sized person's torso, but it's not like his graduate program offered Cryptozoological Studies, and he can only ever come to the headachey conclusion that Cecil must be built like the goddamn House of Leaves, bigger on the inside than on the outside. 

(He would X-ray Cecil to find out, but everyone in Night Vale gets _far_ too much radiation anyway.)

After said first time, limp and drained in the aftermath but with the biologist in him well and truly excited, he'd asked Cecil what sort of genitalia the opposite-sex counterpart of his species possessed; but Cecil had seemed so confused about both the 'opposite sex' part and the 'your species' part that Carlos had abandoned the line of questioning on grounds of epic awkwardness. He still hasn't managed to broach the reproductive component of the question yet - maybe after a few more months of cohabitation? - but he has the sinking/leaping feeling that Cecil might actually be able, in theory, to conceive children. Accordingly he's always pretty adamant about using condoms.

Cecil is also by far the kinkiest person Carlos has ever taken to bed. Because this is Night Vale, though, he doesn't even know it - as Carlos had found out immediately _after_ their first time.

( _"Puta **madre**_ ," he'd cursed, panting into the pillows, so thoroughly fucked-out that he felt lightheaded with it, sex-stoned. "Fuck, Cecil, you're _filthy,"_ and Cecil's expression slid from smugly pleased to quizzically blank.

"What do you mean?"

Carlos gestured dumbly down at their bodies, naked skin bruised and bitten in more places than not, blood and saliva mixing slick with their releases. Cecil followed his gaze, eyebrows raised in polite confusion.

"Is that not how you normally do it?" he said, a little cautiously.

 _"No,"_ Carlos exclaimed, and then before Cecil's face could fall any further, he hastily added, "That's not a bad thing! I just didn't necessarily expect you to be so, um, freaky."

"Oh, thank you!" Cecil said proudly, and Carlos supposed that 'freak' was probably a straight-up compliment in this town. "But, Carlos, I don't understand - _I_ thought it was all pretty vanilla, what we did. I mean, you didn't even _strangle_ me."

"Strangle you?" Carlos said, kind of horrified. "Cecil, that stuff's not _safe."_

Cecil looked even blanker at that, and Carlos clarified, "You know, like - if I cut off your breath too long by accident, you could _die."_

Cecil laughed, which seemed inappropriate given the context until he reached for Carlos's hand, lifted it gently to his own throat, and said: "Carlos, you don't think I _breathe_ through there, do you?"

"- well, I _did,"_ Carlos said, totally floored by now. "Is that - I take it that's not the case?"

Cecil laughed again and moved Carlos's hand further up, till his fingers were stroking right behind Cecil's ear - where he could feel some distinctly nonstandard raised…slit thingies.

"Are those," he said, and then stopped, briefly overcome. "Cecil, do you have _gills?"_

Cecil just blinked innocently up at him. "I thought you knew."

"Well," Carlos said again, and exhaled hard. "I guess sexy choking is back on the table."

"Oh good," Cecil said happily, and yanked him back down.)

-

"So you're reasonably certain," Carlos checks, "that those - fish things - are _not_ going to invade our bedroom within the next, oh say, hour or so?"

"Don't worry about it," Cecil reassures, sliding both hands up the sides of Carlos's neck to wind into his hair, then back down to push the lab coat off his shoulders. "I redrew the pentacle only yesterday," and it's true that the star lines crisscrossing their bedroom floor are glowing a particularly intense shade of scarlet just now.

"Great," says Carlos, "'cause that would really murder the mood," and grins at him.

"And what mood might that be," Cecil says archly, then shivers as Carlos scrapes the edges of his fingernails over the front of his shirt, dipping down to where Cecil's navel would be, if Cecil had a navel. Which he doesn't. Carlos hasn't yet gotten around to asking about it, and at this point it seems like it would just be sort of rude and awkward to do so. Anyway, what Cecil does have in its place is a fairly sensitive erogenous zone, and even just Carlos's glancing touch through clothing is making every muscle in his torso jump in a fascinating fashion. 

To Carlos, Cecil's body is still amazing on both a personal and professional level, and every time he gets it under his hands like this, scientific curiosity and honest lust combine into a nearly overpowering urge to explore it as thoroughly as possible. 

"Hey," he says, and reaches out to hook a playful finger into the knot of Cecil's tie, drags him in close enough to tip their foreheads together, smiling again. "Thanks for coming out to rescue me." 

For whatever reason, that makes Cecil blush brightly - more so than the lewdest come-ons in Carlos's arsenal - all along his throat and cheekbones and the tips of his ears. It's adorable. It's also a delicate shade of lilac, and not for the first time, Carlos is gripped by a momentary wish to analyze that blood of his, the deep and lovely violet that must swim through Cecil's veins. He thinks Cecil would totally let him, too; after all, like 53% of Night Vale's population, Cecil doesn't have any pain receptors. 

Well, knowing Cecil's tastes, Carlos just needs to be patient and probably they'll get around to erotic vivisection before they even hit their one-year anniversary next month - or was it last month? The recent reboot of Night Vale's fourth dimension is really throwing him off. Or will throw him off.

"You're welcome!" Cecil says, or tries to say, but it comes out kind of strangled when Carlos works a hand up under his shirt and smooths it over that hotspot on his abdomen, skin on skin now. The illicit thrill of it reminds Carlos of his early teenage fumblings with girls, trying to get to second base, which is not an experience he'd ever expected to echo in bed with a guy. Or a - whatever Cecil is; on their municipal forms he always ticks the gender box labeled PAISLEY, which tells Carlos precisely nothing.

That reminds him - "Uh, our permits are up to date, right?" Taking care of all that bureaucracy stuff is one hundred percent Cecil's department: Carlos, who used to consider himself pretty tech-savvy back in the outside world, can't even manage to access Night Vale's heavily promoted official town website without his browser inexplicably redirecting him to 4chan /x/ every single time.

Cecil nods. He's still blushing like crazy, which is absurdly endearing. "Mm-hm, for all the standard options in the Humanoid Carnal Activity series - oh, except vore, unbirthing and sexual cannibalism."

"The -?"

"They take all this extra Health Department paperwork that I just couldn't be bothered to deal with," Cecil sighs, "so that's off the menu, uh, so to speak. Hope you don't mind?"

"No no, that's. Just fine," Carlos tells him, wondering if that also covers erotic vivisection.

"Yay," Cecil says, entirely seriously, and gazes moonily up into Carlos's eyes.

-

They've stripped to the waist, now, the better for Carlos's hands to tease at Cecil's nipples and wander down between Cecil's hipbones - and on Cecil's bare skin, his ink follows the touch: the impossibly intricate linework of vines twining their way around his chest and arms, back and sides, with thick-fringed eyes peeping out here and there from behind the clustering leaves. The designs ripple responsively when Carlos traces them with a fingertip, outlines moving in constant metamorphosis, shifting and changing.

Carlos is not part of the 18.7% of Night Valeans who possess telepathic abilities, but when Cecil's got his shirt off, he doesn't need to. The tattoos act like a mood ring, intimately linked to his emotional state, moment by moment, and they reveal it as clearly as any mind-reading: a thousand climbing tendrils that sprout needlelike thorns when Cecil's pissed off, a hundred limpid eyes that dilate dark when Cecil's turned on.

They're doing it right now, blinking up slowly at Carlos through their heavy lashes, and when Cecil wordlessly reaches up and takes off his glasses, sets them on the bedside table, Carlos can see that he's got the exact same look in his two eyes proper. Not that he really needed the confirmation: tattoos aside, even, Cecil removing his glasses is always a sure sign that he's up for some intensive fooling around.

Carlos pulls him down into the sheets and kisses and kisses him, which does very little to stop Cecil from talking nonetheless. 

Before Cecil, Carlos had never really been that into the whole dirty-talk thing. But Cecil literally speaks for a living, and that carries right on over into their bedroom, a velvet-voiced stream of rapturous worship of Carlos's every attribute (which still makes Carlos squirm to hear it, but is also not exactly hard on the ego), philosophical ponderings on the nature of the universe, pure pornographic filth concerning their own present and future intimate activities together, and professions of love (albeit frequently with a somewhat unnerving edge to them, like the other night when he'd murmured dreamily into Carlos's neck for five straight minutes about how when they were both dead and buried in one crypt their dust of their bodies would intermingle and they would be truly one at last).

Fortunately, Carlos really likes Cecil's voice. It was actually the whole reason that he'd ever paused to listen to five minutes of WTNV in the first place - he'd had insomnia and a wicked headache, courtesy of his first emotionally-traumatic and scientifically-mindboggling week in Night Vale, and inexplicably enough the unknown announcer's voice had seemed to help with both. Moreover it was the medium by which he first came to know Cecil, a little, just listening to his show as he worked in the lab, perplexed and calmed by it in equal measure, trying to work out the nature of the speaker behind it, like it was the key to grasping the nature of Night Vale itself.

Anyway, so he's a way bigger fan of Cecil's sex rambling than he'd ever expected to be. It makes him feel like he can just lie back and let himself be caressed by the soothing cadences of Cecil's words - no, like literally: since moving to Night Vale, he's developed a mild case of sound-touch synesthesia.

"Magnificent Carlos," Cecil is purring, nosing against the five o'clock stubble at Carlos's jawline. "What must I have done in a past existence to deserve you?" and his hands sink into Carlos's thick, dark hair, fingers catching hold of the curls and pulling just hard enough to make Carlos's scalp tingle pleasantly.

"I could ask the same," Carlos says, closing his eyes. One of the nice things about being with Cecil is that Carlos can be as sappy as he wants to without ever worrying about being laughed at, since Cecil's too busy being about fifteen billion times more sentimental himself. "If I believed in reincarnation."

"Ask not if you believe in reincarnation," Cecil intones in a vaguely ominous fashion, "but if reincarnation believes in _you."_

Carlos doesn't ask. Commitment to the scientific method aside, in this town it's often better to just - not, as the Secret Police had informed him just the other day in a tersely worded missive smeared in two-foot-high letters on one wall of his lab (not with a writing utensil, naturally, but with what appeared to be boysenberry jam). WE'RE ONLY LETTING YOU OFF WITH A WARNING THIS TIME BECAUSE THE VOICE OF NIGHT VALE LOVES YOU, it had concluded. SINCERELY, YOUR FRIENDLY LOCAL ARM OF THE SHADOW GOVERNMENT. P.S. DO YOU EVER CLEAN IN HERE??

Carlos, who had to concede that they were right about the last bit, had gone on a cleaning binge during which he scrubbed away all of the jammy message except the part about Cecil loving him, which is now beginning to ferment and attract flies, but seeing it there on the wall when he comes into work every day just puts such a goofy smile on his face that he can't bring himself to get rid of it.

Cecil hums contentedly into Carlos's temple and starts idly licking the salt from his skin. Carlos has a theory that Cecil's body chemistry calls for more sodium than a normal person's, because he consumes at least twice as much of it on a daily basis as Carlos did in grad school - and as a grad student he'd pretty much survived on beef jerky and ramen, so that's really saying something. Cecil also must be emitting more of those peculiar tranquilizing vibrations that Carlos's equipment keeps _almost_ picking up from him, because this is the first time all day that Carlos has felt really relaxed. Although admittedly by Night Vale standards it wasn't even that harrowing of a day. 

It's probably unhealthy how comparatively Zen he's become about the daily casualty count, the constant violations of basic laws of physics, the giant alligators in the sewers that Cecil insists don't exist even though one of them nearly ate the mayor a few weeks ago, and the zillion other objectively appalling aspects of the city-sized house of horrors he now calls home. Maybe it's got something to do with the way Night Vale wears said horrors so matter-of-factly on its sleeve. Every other place Carlos has lived, people tended to sweep their monstrosities under the rug like dirty secrets and pretend they weren't there. Here it's different, here everybody understands and acknowledges that something is very wrong basically all the time, and Carlos takes a perverse comfort in that.

It's the same with Cecil, Cecil who is so, so sweet and so, so strange; Cecil, who has somehow managed the trick of becoming Carlos's safe place in a town where there are no safe places.

He slides his hand in between Cecil's thighs, part of him still marveling a little at how he's put together down there; his fingers touch soft wetness, and then stiff hardness, and Cecil turns his face into the pillow and moans. It's a gorgeous sound.

"Oh, _Carlos,"_ he breathes, over-the-top reverence that Carlos knows to be entirely sincere, and he surges up to cover Carlos's body with his own, ink writhing a mile a minute, frantic. 

Carlos promptly rolls them over - Cecil's laundry list of, uh, 'special' attributes does not include superhuman strength - and then smirks victoriously down at Cecil, who is totally on board with this position too, if the aroused state of his various areas of erectile tissue is any indication.

Which - it took Carlos a not-insignificant amount of time and effort to master exactly how to go down on Cecil, and he never misses a chance to further hone his skills: so with Cecil pinned like this beneath him, hard and dripping, it's only logical to get in a little bit of practice.

He bends his head, breathing warmth over the tender flesh of Cecil's inner thighs; Cecil groans again and tangles a shaking hand through Carlos's hair. The flipside of Cecil's mouthy-in-bed schtick is that when he's _really_ far gone he runs out of words and finally shuts up and just gives himself over to it with a sigh; and if Carlos has a kink for Cecil's voice (and he does, oh, does he ever) then he _really_ has a kink for Cecil reduced to speechlessness.

Which is also why Cecil sucking cock is so hot to him…but they can get to that later.

He licks _up_ and _out_ with his tongue as flattened as he can make it, then _down_ and _in_ with his tongue as pointed as he can make it, then repeats the whole process again. And again, and again, and again. Knowing Cecil, even that much should just about 

\- do it, yes - 

He swallows sloppily - something he doesn't mind doing for Cecil, whose come always tastes faintly of raspberry lemonade and when ingested produces a low-level buzz so closely comparable to alcohol intoxication that Carlos once narrowly escaped getting a DUI after a particularly memorable date - and raises his head just in time to watch Cecil shudder through the final throes: eyes flashing a color that doesn't quite exist on the visible light spectrum, chanting Carlos's name like he's casting a spell, or entranced by one.

Their first time, Carlos had thought Cecil's hair-trigger was a total buzzkill, but that was before ( _just_ before) he'd discovered that multiple orgasms _were_ one of Cecil's special attributes. Which sort of makes sense, considering Cecil's whole genital situation…or as much sense as anything ever makes in this town, anyway.

(Truth be told, Carlos still hasn't conclusively ruled out the possibility that the entire population of Night Vale are straight-up aliens. They're not _that_ far from Roswell, after all.) 

\- 

In terms of basic mechanics, Cecil is able to fuck and be fucked. In that he's no different from any other guy Carlos has slept with, technically speaking; it's just that with Cecil, there are…options. Carlos has gotten off with him probably a hundred times, by now, and done so in at least a dozen different configurations; but if pressed (and that's not just a figure of speech in Night Vale, where the City Council likes to stage random interrogations every once in a while just to keep the citizenry on their toes) he'd gladly admit that his favorite of all is fucking _while_ being fucked. 

The first time, one cold Samhain night, that Carlos had gotten his dick inside Cecil while Cecil was simultaneously inside _him,_ he'd thought he might actually, literally die from the overstimulation (there's probably a municipal form for that, too, the Midcoital Expiration Report or something). It had taken all of Cecil's inhuman hyper-flexibility to make everything fit together exactly right, but the feeling was more than worth a few moments of awkward scrambling around figuring out logistics: Carlos had never - has still never - felt anything remotely comparable to the sweet give of Cecil around his cock and the hard burn of Cecil in his ass, all at once. 

Cecil had nailed Carlos's prostate on the first thrust - entirely by accident, as Carlos had already determined during their earlier experiments with fisting that Cecil didn't actually have one of those (nor testicles, oddly enough, although he _definitely_ had a G-spot or something like it) - and coupled with the plunge of his dick into slick yielding tightness, it was so goddamn _good_ that Carlos groaned out in the wrong language without meaning to, _dámelo, duro,_ and Cecil huffed against his shoulderblade, "What? Sorry, you know I only ever took Weird Spanish." 

From what Carlos had heard of so-called Weird Spanish, he was pretty certain that it was actually Totally Regular Portuguese, but he hadn't had the heart to point that out to Cecil nor, indeed, the eminently terrifying School Board. 

"Don't worry about it," he instead said inanely, and then couldn't say anything at all when Cecil interpreted his non-Weird Spanish correctly anyway and pounded right back into that spot once more. Maybe Cecil _did_ share a touch of 18.7% of his fellow citizens' telepathy, or maybe he was just good at sex, or maybe he and Carlos had exceptionally terrific chemistry. Maybe all of the above. 

He sucks a hickey into the pale flesh of Cecil's throat, vibrant indigo rising to the surface, and Cecil murmurs, "I can feel my capillaries breaking." 

"- yup," says Carlos. "Is - that's okay?" 

"Divine," Cecil says dreamily. 

"Good," Carlos says, and kisses up his temple, scratching lavender stubble-burn along his neck for good measure. 

Cecil bends his neck around at an especially unnatural angle (Carlos once counted his vertebrae while they were lazing in bed one canceled-Wednesday afternoon, Cecil lying half-asleep on his stomach; he'd come up with at least five and a half too many, and it seemed like the count kept changing every time he took it) and sticks his tongue in Carlos's ear. That does absolutely nothing for Carlos, but Cecil _loves_ it, and Carlos loves Cecil, so. 

"Come here," Cecil is whispering, or at least that's what Carlos thinks he says: it's kind of hard to tell with Cecil's tongue still halfway up his ear canal. "Here, shh, let me, I've got you," and Carlos closes his eyes in overwhelmed pleasure as he pushes into Cecil and Cecil pushes into him. 

"Oh, _Carlos,"_ Cecil's purring for probably the fifteenth time this evening. He flexes his hips, pulling Carlos deeper onto him and deeper _in_ to him, all at once. "God, I want to carve my name in runic letters on your viscera." 

"That - sounds like it would hurt," Carlos gasps out, with some effort because fuck, Cecil feels so _good._

"I always forget there's some pain you can't take," Cecil says regretfully, "you seem to like it so much in its milder forms - are you _sure?"_

"Positive," Carlos tells him, very firmly. "It would not be survivable." 

"Shame," Cecil sighs. "Ah well," and then trails off into undifferentiated vowel sounds as Carlos hits the sweet spot. 

He's already pretty worked up himself from watching Cecil come half a dozen times, but he tries to force himself to take it slow, make it last, since _he_ can only manage the one orgasm (or two on a good night, but he's not as young as he once was). Also he has to _work_ for it, unlike Cecil, who can pretty much go off at the drop of a hat. Initially he'd worried that Cecil would find such limitations dull and disappointing, but on the contrary, Cecil had gone into transports about how SINGULAR and PRECIOUS it was, like a RARE TREASURE, because he really does think that everything about Carlos is awesome. 

That's the only thing about Cecil that still scares him, really: that degree of adoration (well…that and the way that Cecil will sometimes start sleeptalking in an _Exorcist_ -style guttural growl in the middle of the night, but hey, nobody's perfect). Carlos has been with people before who liked him very much, loved him even, but nothing remotely like this. It's weird to think that he might just have found the love of his life in this eerie, arid twilight zone, where science doesn't work like it should and his very normality is what makes him a something of a freakish outsider. 

Part of him keeps waiting for the other shoe to drop, for Cecil to finally realize that nobody merits this kind of infatuation. It hasn't happened yet, though, not even now that they live together and have to deal with each other's snoring (Cecil) and shower-hogging (Carlos) and science-induced distraction (Carlos again) and bimonthly skin-molting (Cecil) - so. That's something. 

\- 

From outside comes a disgusting skittering-slithering sound, as if unholy chthonic lifeforms were swarming over the outside of their building, which is probably actually exactly the case. Carlos pauses mid-thrust to listen in horrified fascination, darts a questioning glance at Cecil. 

"I told you we have nothing to worry _ah_ \- bout," Cecil responds, voice breaking as he arches his hips up impatiently and Carlos distractedly pushes down to meet him. "Look," and he jerks his hot-cheeked, sweaty-haired head in the general direction of the pentacle on their floor, which is now shooting up eighteen-inch licks of an odd rose-red fire that doesn't appear to give off tangible heat.

"If you say so," Carlos breathes, resuming the task at hand while reflecting that if Cecil's wrong, at least they'll go out in pretty much the best way possible.

Plus there's the fact that Cecil - though mostly gentle of heart and mostly unmuscular of body - would assuredly not hesitate to throw down with any creature on earth that made the mistake of menacing Carlos. Carlos knows this both intuitively and from empirical evidence, namely that one time when a huge pack of desert coyotes roamed into town, every one of them inhabited by hungry ghosts, or maybe just the one ghost spreading itself around - Carlos doesn't claim to be an expert on the ins and outs of cross-species possession.

He'd ended up fleeing the scenes of carnage in the downtown streets, running for his life towards the higher ground where the buildings thinned out near the edge of town, towards the radio station, with a couple of coyotes-that-weren't still in hot pursuit. Eerily non-canine shrieks burst from their slavering jaws as Carlos barreled through in through the main door, bare steps ahead of them, and hammered frantically at the nearest wall of the little studio where Cecil spent most of his work day. By a stroke of great good fortune (or possibly the Elder Gods looking out for him; maybe there's a reason that Cecil performs veneration rites for the both of them in the bloodstone circle every alternate Thursday) the weather part of the broadcast was on, so Cecil was - for once - not sitting there with his giant headphones on, deaf to the world. Instead he'd heard Carlos's panicky pounding and shouting, popped the door right open, and Carlos went sprawling inelegantly across the threshold in his haste to scramble inside; the hellhounds were still right on his heels and one - a hulking brute with ravenous hatred in its glowing eyes - made a snap for his leg. 

Cecil took one wide-eyed look at Carlos, Carlos in _danger_ yet _again,_ and grabbed the first thing that came to hand, which happened to be an umbrella that said **NIGHT VALE COMMUNITY RADIO** across it in big purple letters - or more accurately, since it was still folded, **N T   V E   C U Y   R O**. (Carlos remembers wondering, at the time, why on earth anyone would have an umbrella just lying around in this climate. Now - he thinks, listening to the raindrops spattering the windowpane - he supposes he knows.) He'd beaten back the beasts with such uncharacteristic ferocity, not to mention growling - by Cecil, that is; the un-coyotes were still doing that awful keening thing - that Carlos was a little scared and more than a little turned on, right there in the middle of what was literally the least sexy or sexually appropriate situation imaginable. 

When they finally turned tail and ran, it was down the little hallway leading to the men's restrooms, and a few moments later Carlos and Cecil heard their demonic cries drowned right out by a monstrous meow, followed by a horrible gulping sound, and then long silence. Some minutes later, once they'd finally gotten up the courage to venture out of the booth and go check, Khoshekh had been floating in his normal mid-air position with a suspiciously swollen stomach and a distinctly smug expression on his little kitty face.

Thankfully, the haunting had been temporary and the final death toll surprisingly low.

-

Cecil's stretching up to kiss him, eagerly - he's never not eager, really, it's kind of darling - and Carlos moves to meet him, slips his tongue past those disconcertingly pointy teeth and eats up every lovely sigh (seriously, Cecil's _voice,_ he won't ever get over it) as they strain against each other in the sweaty sheets. Cecil wraps his improbably bendy legs up around Carlos's ass, pulling him impossibly closer; he nuzzles into Carlos's sideburn, eyes falling shut, and Carlos bites hard at his right earlobe, careful of the curved spike of black bone pierced through it.

(He's never gotten around to asking Cecil exactly what type of claw it is, nor why Cecil wears it as an earring. Possibly he's better off not knowing.)

Cecil makes a heartfelt _hhngh_ noise which Carlos correctly interprets to mean _more._ To him it feels like he's already tugging hard enough to damn near rip it right out of Cecil's head, but not only does Cecil lack pain receptors, he also has extraordinarily elastic skin - whence, Carlos guesses, his predilection for fisting.

So he shelves his instinctive reservations, as one so often must do in Night Vale, and just sets his teeth in Cecil's flesh until Cecil groans again, exquisite in his agony. The carmine flame jetting all around them - in addition to doing its job, apparently, so far, of warding off things that go bump in the night - also provides the secondary benefit of amazing mood lighting: flickering shadows that play over Cecil's fuchsia-flushed features and ever-moving tattoos, turning him into something sublime and satanic (or angelic…because now Carlos has seen real angels, in all their shining, unutterable terror). 

He's so hot and slippery inside, easing every deep stroke of Carlos's cock, and wet where he's pulsing hard inside Carlos's ass, his whole beautiful improbable body shuddering out its wordless, certain _welcome._ He's also trying to yank on Carlos's hair, stroke his face and grope his ass all at the same time, exhaling in frustration when he doesn't have quite enough hands and settling instead for raking his fingernails up Carlos's bare back, hard. His nails, like his teeth, are sharper than they reasonably should be, and they score into Carlos's skin deeply enough to draw blood, but by now Carlos is so far gone that it only registers as one more penetration point, just another place where they glory in violating the boundaries of one another's bodies.

Cecil's ongoing vocalizations pass abruptly beyond his normal raspy moaning to the low, serpentine hiss Carlos only ever hears when Cecil's utterly worn out with pleasure and still coming anyway. It's his last one of the night for sure, clenching so weak it's more like an exhausted flutter, but still he doesn't pull out of Carlos - or vice versa - as if reluctant to relinquish any part of him. He must be sore by now, Carlos thinks for a second, and then remembers the pain receptors.

He's getting frantic for it, reaching up to dash the sweat out of his eyes so he can see Cecil properly. There on Cecil's skin, under his hands, the inky eyes watch him unblinkingly back. The view out their bedroom window keeps shifting back and forth by about forty vertical feet, like several floors of their building are vanishing and reappearing on some sort of glitchy loop. The moon in the sky is full for the third time in two weeks, and suddenly Carlos is overwhelmed, all of it surging up like floodwaters, bursting over him: the ambulatory aquatic marauders, the fragile wonder of each new day survived alive in this little corner of dystopia where all paranoias are true. Every curling frond and climbing strand of Cecil's tattoos is coiling up tight like a fern brushed with a finger, and Carlos has another of those moments where he's struck at once, all over again, by Cecil's intrinsic _otherness_ , how far he really is from anything Carlos has ever known -

and he's clearly been living here for too long, because that's what does it for him, finally, makes him come all over where Cecil ought to have a navel (but doesn't) and oughtn't to have a double dose of genitalia (but does) and he's whispering, mindlessly, codeswitching by accident, _cariño_ and _corazón_ punctuated with Cecil's name - 

and as he does, Cecil's whole body bursts into bloom, ink blossoming out every which way out of sheer delight, a riot of flora running rampant across his pale flesh like cactus-flowers after rain.

-

" _That_ was particularly fabulous," Cecil sighs happily, leaning out of bed just enough to light his requisite postcoital cigarette off the magic protective pentacle fire, which still isn't producing any actual warmth to speak of. "I'll see if I can scrounge a copy of the tape."

"Tape?" Carlos says blankly, and Cecil gives him a patient, slightly pitying look, waiting for it. "…ah, right. The police surveillance footage. That tape."

"There you go!" Cecil smiles and blows a smoke triangle in Carlos's direction. His cigarettes always come in a long slim holder like some old filmstar's and emit a thin, silvery vapor that, even inhaled secondhand, induces a contact high not dissimilar to the peyote Carlos tried once in college. Although he supposes that if he were hallucinating in Night Vale, it'd be hard to tell the difference.

He glances back at the fire, and sees that it's guttering noticeably.

"Uh, Cecil…"

"Mm."

"It's going away!" A tinge of panic creeps into his afterglow.

"Of course," Cecil replies between laconic puffs. "Because _they're_ going away," and Carlos becomes aware of a definite reduction in the volume and frequency of repulsive skritching noises from outside. Small mercies.

He breathes out in exhausted relief - from the sex, from the mortal terror, take your pick - and Cecil adds, "See? I told you."

Because Cecil indubitably saved his ass from a gruesome death-or-maiming today, and also because Carlos loves him, he forebears from mentioning that time just last Monday when all the sidewalk cracks in Night Vale had started opening up into yawning chasms that swallowed whole families alive and Cecil was all, "Oh, no worries, the City Council says it's just an epidemic of completely random and minor sinkholes" and then narrowly escaped losing a leg to one of said gaping abysses immediately afterwards.

Instead he stretches out along Cecil's side, and says sleepily, "So you think they'll all be gone by tomorrow?"

"Of course," Cecil replies, like it's obvious. "They can't survive long out of water, after all," which is both the most and least sensible thing that Carlos has heard all day, especially coming from a man…or whatever Cecil is…with his very own set of gills (currently fluttering softly open-and-shut, open-and-shut, against Carlos's left bicep).

"But -" he starts, and then, as Cecil quirks a curious eyebrow, finishes, "- that seems logical."

"See, I know science too," Cecil says proudly, and curls further into Carlos's side.

Their discarded clothes are still mostly tangled through the bedding and Carlos is too blissed-out to bother with collecting them again. Let the fish-things attack them in their nudity, let the omnipresent eyes of the cryptocracy stare their fill: he really, truly couldn't care less right now.

Which reminds him - 

"Fish with legs…The flash flood came in through Radon Canyon, right?" he muses into Cecil's shoulder, where the animate tattoos have calmed down again, evidently as exhausted as their owner. "I wonder if all that nuclear waste -"

"Gamma rays are good for you," Cecil responds with the peacefully rote rhythm of something learned by heart in early childhood. "Don't be preposterous, Carlos."

Carlos is feeling too wonderful - and too tired - to try and argue this point either; instead he smiles fondly at Cecil, and saves his equally fond headshake for the pillow when Cecil isn't looking.

"Cross-species mutations," he muses, and his eyes flit down Cecil's body, speculative. "Hey, Cecil, do you think -"

"Mmhmm?" Cecil, who after all did have (by Carlos's count) seven orgasms tonight, is fading fast.

"Do you suppose we're, uh - genetically compatible?" Carlos blurts out before he can think better of it.

Cecil tilts his cheek to look up at Carlos, quizzically at first; then his eyes do that melty thing again - only exponentially more so - and he says in hushed tones, "Are you - you're talking about _spawning_ a _litter_ with _me?_ Oh, _Carlos."_

Carlos flounders, comes up with a "Yes?" and then the hasty addendum: "You know, eventually. Not any time soon -"

Cecil rolls over to give him a giant hug, tight to the point of pain, like a boa constrictor if a boa constrictor could be stupidly in love. Which maybe they can, Carlos has no clue. "Just so you know, I'd never eat our own young, not even the runty ones. That's how much I love you," he mumbles, and promptly drifts off.

"How many young in a litter?" Carlos asks a few moments later, but it's to dead air. 

He presses a silent _I love you too_ into Cecil's temple anyway, and hopes fervently that he was right about Cecil's mystery anatomy being suited for multiple pregnancies - or any pregnancies at all, really - because he's pretty sure that his own is not. 

It's still raining but no longer very hard, just a soft ghostlike _tap-tap-tap_ ping at the windowpanes - unless that's actual ghosts; Carlos does not go check, having learned long ago that looking out your darkened windows in Night Vale is just _asking_ to see some awful thing with its face (or lack thereof) pressed up against the glass staring back at you. Instead he snuggles into Cecil's side, which is too-warm as usual - by human standards of thermoregulation, that is, not that he's too warm for comfort. On the contrary, these desert nights can get surprisingly chilly, and it's kind of nice sleeping with a living space heater.

Somewhere out upon the saturated sands, a bloodcurdling scream pierces the night as the marine abominations claim yet another victim. Cecil makes a little noise that's not quite a word (or maybe it is a word in some eldritch tongue, who knows?) and turns in the sheltering circle of Carlos's arms.

 

 

                _it will be all right. Slow inch_  
 _by inch America is giving itself_  
 _to the ocean. Go to sleep. Let darkness_  
 _lap at your sides. Give darkness an inch._  
 _You aren’t alone._

**Author's Note:**

> fun fact: the stick-figure doodles that I used to work out the positioning of the mutual-penetration scene and Cecil's anatomy in general are literally the most embarrassing thing that anybody has ever made with MS Paint in the history of the world. I didn't cram all those specifics into the story because I don't find over-detailed descriptions of naughty bits particularly sexy, but suffice to say it's totally doable! also in the course of my ~research I learned that a very select minority of dudes (with standard human genitalia, even!) have in fact performed said activity with other dudes. THE MORE YOU KNOW
> 
> I owe Night Vale's plague-of-the-week to [Junji Ito](http://www.mangareader.net/gyo/1), the end quote to [Albert Goldbarth](http://anatomyofmelancholy.tumblr.com/post/10395036338/the-sciences-sing-a-lullabye), the summary to [Bowie](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOPRrXXWORk) and the title to [Sting](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3lWwBslWqg).


End file.
